In my cube is a refurbished 24-inch iMac that I'm preparing to use for testing. We don't have many iMacs in-house but we're slowing migrating to them from the Mac Pros, which are more than we need.
iMacs are stylish and sleek, but I was cursing Apple's "design" this morning until I discovered they solved my problem before I had one.
The bartender says, "Get out! We don't serve your type in here!"
I'm going to put this on a cover page for a meeting I've called at work to explain font licensing to developers and managers. Below that it will say:
This is the funniest thing you'll ever hear about fonts. It all goes downhill from here.
As part of re-inventing Frankenstein at work, I have to determine the best way to take an existing Mac with two Mac OS X 10.4.x partitions and upgrade it to two Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 partitions. Remotely.
Our project manager included this in her kick-off meeting invitation a week ago:
If implementation is scheduled to occur on 12/31/09, then we have 163 business days to do "everything" from today, 5/12. <reality check>
I support a Composition department that has a very complex workflow system. It's a combination of internal web servers for file storage and job-tracking, Macs running third-party applications, lots of custom-developed applications, lots of scripting and lots of managed preferences.
For the next several months, we'll be re-engineering this Frankenstein system that we developed for about $2 million four years ago and has generated over $100 million since then. The project's goal is to bring all software up-to-date so that we are poised to be able to transition to a different platform in a few years if management decides that's the best direction. My goal is to re-engineer what I put together four years ago, applying new technologies and knowledge that I've gained during that time.
Roll-out of the re-engineered system for about 90 Macs in two different countries (the U.S. and India) takes place over a weekend.
Yesterday our boss stopped by and was spreading the panic that someone in our security department started about the Acrobat 8.1.3 update. According to the release notes it addresses a number of vulnerabilities and Adobe classifies the update as "critical".
So, how do I apply this patch to about 100 Macs in our company? By hand.
My co-worker Robert has a brilliantly fast and accurate mind, which makes him perfect for his job as a software developer. I can ask in the most obscure UNIX question and he can answer me with exactly what I need. He has this uncanny ability to begin a story about something, diverge to other subjects for five minutes and somehow regain his train of thought and relate everything together.
While we were having lunch Wednesday I saw him getting distracted while telling one of his stories and then his eyes started to water a little as he struggled keep talking.
Standing in the men's restroom at work making small talk with our CEO. That's what guys do.
He asked me how things were going and I said, "It's Thursday!" After he chuckled a bit I said I couldn't wait until next week when I'll be attending a mini Mac MVP summit hosted by the MacBU at Microsoft. I explained that I'm getting to speak with the developers about the next version of Office for Macintosh.
Since the beginning of the year (maybe since late last year) we’ve all heard the rumors and then confirmations that our company would be splitting into two separate entities and literally going their own ways. Wow! Doesn’t that make employees paranoid?
After two rounds of lay-offs earlier this year where we literally lost over 120 users in our part of the split, my group was told it would be responsible for all tech support and that would include servers, workstations and network.
We’ve been a small business unit IT group supporting mostly Macs and now we’re being asked to prepare to collect our marbles and go play elsewhere. Everyone in our group has extensive cross-platform experience with Macs, Windows and UNIX, so we’re confident about our roles and expertise, but we now get the chance to start over on so many things!
Our network has been handled by one group, our Windows Server team was another group and our own Mac group was mostly left out of any infrastructure decisions long ago because we weren’t “standard” or as most in the biz can understand: we weren’t “Windows”.
Now, we get to start over.
My company is making a major push to move to Microsoft SharePoint, which is a great move! They are planning to replace our outdated Intranet site (can anyone say “frames”?) with SharePoint and create group sites. Everything about this project is a home run.
One of the initiatives is training and we’ve contracted with a company about 30 minutes away from the office to provide SharePoint training. Folks from our office have been attending in masses and today was my turn to take the first of two courses. My “Contributor” course had me tweeting “Killlll meeee!” at the end of the two hours.
Our regional Apple representatives held a small seminar at The Foundation, a local VAR of Apple products. The topic was about Mac administration and Active Directory integration.
Eric, the speaker for the morning, referred to a project that I’d heard about called InstaDMG, which is being developed by the fine folks at the AFP548.com website. I’ve been hearing about InstaDMG for several months but my initial research found it to be of little benefit in our environment at work. I had dismissed it as another package maker.
